The New York Times Is In Denial About 2024

It’s still amusing to watch the dying media act like they were innocent bystanders of the 2024 election season rather than, you know, actively running the Democrat nominee’s campaign (a reality they refuse to admit).

A New York Times editorial last month confidently declared that the Democrat Party is “in denial about 2024” because, the paper said, “In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message.”

The Times ultimately concluded that Democrats are in need of “honest reflection” if the party wants to “win future elections” and pointed to several specific areas that led to defeat last year. One was the failure to dump Joe Biden overboard sooner.

“[T]hey should admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age,” the editorial board said. “Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise.” That’s interesting. When confronted with video evidence of Biden publicly lost in a daze, the Times published an article calling those videos “misleading.”

And here’s another knee-slapper of a headline atop a piece by the paper’s “critic at large” A.O. Scott: “For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style.” That piece, in earnest, suggested that Biden wasn’t crippling in front of our very eyes, but had merely “enter[ed] a new and distinctive phase of creativity.”

The Times also suggested that Democrats “recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues,” specifically naming Kamala Harris’ positions on “decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.”

True, those were stupid policies championed by Democrats, but the Times wasn’t a dispassionate observer of them. At the end of President Trump’s first term, after his administration had put in place highly effective measures to limit the obscene flow of migrants illegally crossing into the country, the Times editorial board lamented that they “won’t be easy to undo” and encouraged a potential Democrat successor to Trump to reverse the “cruelest and most pointless” measures initiated by the president (namely, all of them).

As for so-called “transition” surgeries for convicts, ahead of the election, Times correspondent Michael Bender attempted to run interference on that one by discarding concerns as “anti-trans prejudices” and excusing it as an issue because it “affects relatively few people.”

Five days later, the Times editorial board endorsed Harris as “the only patriotic choice for president.” I wonder where Democrats got the impression that everything they were doing was fine.

In its endorsement — which was brave, unlike the cowardly Washington Post, which declined to explicitly support either candidate — the Times described Harris as “a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution.” The paper said she “offered a shared future for all citizens” and “has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.”

Curious, then, that the paper’s editorial just two weeks ago blamed Democrats for failing to offer “new ideas” and singled out Harris for a lack of “intellectual leadership.”

All of this raises the question: Does The New York Times read The New York Times? The paper should give it a try.